Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

In this short piece I think about the ocean as queer and its liberating sensualities as a practice of writing into the surf. What are the dissolutions that emerge from the wetness of the sea? This piece is based on forthcoming work where I expand upon the themes of queer and trans ecologies at the sea's edge.

This article provides a case study of The Lesbians and Policing Project [LesPop], a police monitoring organisation that existed in London between 1984 and 1990. Drawing on archives held at Glasgow Women's Library, the article reviews the activities of LesPop and outlines its aims and objectives. We consider both its origins and its demise in the political context of Britain in the 1980s. In doing so, we argue that LesPop offers an important, and hitherto unexamined, contribution to lesbian history in Britain. Centralising the experiences of lesbians in London in an era of state-sanctioned homophobia, LesPop provides a case study in lesbian political and community organising and engagement with, or resistance to, the carceral state. Understanding how LesPop sought to monitor and research the police and in turn, educate and organise lesbians, reveals much about the regulation of sexuality in the pursuit of social order and illustrates the importance then, and now, of grassroots efforts to challenge homophobia and hold the police to account.

In 1974, women inspired by the back-to-the-land commune movement and women's liberation politics began forming lesbian intentional communities in rural Oregon. Living outside the mainstream allowed them to relinquish gender norms and experience their bodies differently in nature-their lesbian identity was not just a sexual orientation, it was gender non-conforming engaged ecofeminist praxis. The different lands they purchased fifty years ago are situated in the middle of logging country-huge swaths of land around them have been clear-cut over the years, while the lands they continue to care for today serve as conservation sites for old growth forests and all of their more-than-human inhabitants. This essay merges research gathered ten years ago for my master's thesis about the southern Oregon lesbian land community with ongoing written and photographic reflections of my time in the community over many years. This essay is a collection of vignettes and excerpts from interviews that speak to the interspecies and intergenerational intimacies of life on lesbian land and the possible implications for queer and feminist ecological futures more broadly.

My paper analyses Ali Smith's innovative use of queering as a narrative strategy in Girl Meets Boy (2007) and The First Person and Other Stories (2008), focusing on her transformation of narrative structures, epistemic realities, and identity through intertextual engagement. Smith's fiction queers temporality and narrative agency by reimagining classical and literary texts, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Lyly's Gallathea, Shakespeare's plays, and Jane Eyre. I suggest that in Girl Meets Boy, Smith reinterprets Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe to celebrate fluid and transformative identities, intertwining this with feminist activism and queer desire. By employing techniques such as prolepsis and analepsis, she destabilizes binary categories of gender and narrative form. My paper also examines The First Person and Other Stories, where Smith uses the short story form to experiment with self-reflexive and elliptical structures, disrupting traditional notions of linearity. I will examine how stories such as "third person," "second person," and "fidelio and bess" illustrate her capacity to reframe historical and cultural narratives, transforming them into spaces for queer textual exploration. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler, Marina Warner, and Linda Hutcheon, my analysis positions Smith's work within a lineage of literary metamorphosis that resists static notions of identity and storytelling. Ultimately, I argue that Smith queers the boundaries of knowledge, time, and narrative itself, creating fiction that is endlessly dynamic and self-referential.

This essay explores how Audre Lorde's work as a professor can help contemporary educators teach students about difference and power. Drawing from my new book Open Admissions, it focuses on two particular facets of her teaching: first, the ways Lorde centered students' ideas to generate collective investment in courses and allow them to learn from one another, and second, how she combined both a public and private pedagogy to help them address the injustice they were studying. I conclude with a brief discussion of how Lorde's work has shaped my own approach to classrooms.

This article explores historical research methods used to locate lesbians and queer women, especially within American and Canadian contexts from the 1960s onward. It begins by discussing methods such as analyzing women's and lesbian travel guides, directories, maps, periodicals, newsletters, newspapers, websites, oral histories, social media, archival fonds and collections. In particular, this article explores how utilizing lesbian and queer women musicians' tour schedules, calendars, correspondence, and contracts for shows and appearances can be a valuable historical research method, especially for locating impermanent historical lesbian and queer women's spaces off the beaten track. The article focuses on the Alix Dobkin Papers as a case study to explore aspects of historical lesbian and queer women's spaces and demonstrate the utility of this historical research method beyond Dobkin. The papers of Alix Dobkin include business correspondence, fan mail, fliers and programs from concerts, subject files, t-shirts, photographs, and memorabilia. As Dobkin played an important role in the women's music movement and toured regularly, her papers provide useful insight into historical debates about lesbian anti-racist politics, ethical consumption, community organizing, and transgender inclusion and exclusion.

Black lesbians experience more adverse health outcomes and economic insecurity in older age than their White counterparts due to enduring a lifetime of marginalization associated with the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Yet, there is a lack of organizations dedicated to empowering and supporting this population. ZAMI NOBLA (National Organization of Black Lesbians on Aging) is the only Black lesbian led national organization in the United States solely invested in improving the wellbeing of Black lesbian elders. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, they worked in solidarity with community partners across the country to leverage technological innovation and community solidarity to combat ageist ideology and elevate the spaces in which Black lesbians and their networks were able to learn, heal, thrive, and live. The organization's efforts fostered solidarity across generations of lesbians and the wider LGBTQ + community.

The process of seeking help for violence in lesbian couples is complex due to the variety of factors and actors that can be involved. It is a process in which the women may or may not take action to ask for some kind of support, depending on the stage at which they find themselves. However, even though women may realise that they are in a situation of mistreatment or abuse in their relationship with their partner or ex-partner, there may be barriers that hinder them from seeking help. This paper presents a systematic review of the barriers that lesbian women encounter in seeking help or accessing support systems when they are victims of intimate partner violence. Out of 139 studies reviewed, 120 were selected for further review, and 8 studies meeting the methodological inclusion criteria were finally selected. The results of this research show that psycho-social and legal barriers exist, which, within a system of oppression - heterosexist society - do not occur in isolation, but are inter-related, making it difficult for lesbian women victims of intimate partner violence to seek help or access support services. This review finds limitations in the literature reviewed and makes recommendations for future research.

Few events evoke a divisive response amongst lesbians like the mentioning of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Autoethnographies, interviews, podcasts, and books - just to name a few - continue to be crafted even after the forty-year festival's end. Unlike previous publications, this article approaches the festival using archival materials housed at Michigan State University donated by producer, Lisa Vogel, to unpack the signaling rhetoric of womyn-born-womyn (WBW). I center the experience Nancy Burkholder, a transsexual woman expelled from the festival, to navigate, as Nancy tried to navigate, the WBW "policy." I then take readers on a journey into the archive and articulate my research through calculated steps of tracing language through years of the festival. This article demonstrates how documents, created by festival producers, incited confusion for Nancy Burkholder during the festival and how these same documents now sustain an archival ambiguity.

This study documented between-group differences in factors associated with sexual revictimization histories in a sample of young sexual minority women. Diverse samples of lesbian (N = 204, age_M = 23.55 years) and bisexual (N = 249, age_M = 23.35 years) women from the United States were recruited using the CloudResearch platform to assess factors associated with recent experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). Participants were categorized into four groups based on self-reports of sexual victimization (a) during childhood and (b) during adulthood in intimate relationships. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was used to model between-group differences in three variable domains: Past-year substance use involvement, minority stress, and violence in relationship and community settings. Lesbian women reporting sexual revictimization in adulthood reported significantly higher scores for measures of past-year substance use involvement and negative consequences, daily discrimination experiences, relational victimization, and criminal victimization, compared to their counterparts with no history of sexual victimization. Among bisexual women, sexual revictimization was associated with a similar pattern of between-group differences. The sexual revictimization experiences of sexual minority women appear to occur in the context of multivariate patterns of harmful substance use, minority stress, and violence in both relationship and community settings. Our findings have implications for how intervention services are provided to emerging adult sexual minority women who experience multiple episodes of sexual abuse during their lifespans. Recommendations include specialized training for counseling or intervention service providers, integrated trauma-informed services that address both substance use and sexual assault issues, and affirmative services for sexual minority women.